3 Lessons from Analyzing the Key Metrics of 155 Nonprofits

And while dissecting all the data, I found myself asking some critical questions. There were a few data issues that we had to think through in order to give an accurate look at how these organizations are performing.

So I thought I’d take a moment to share with you 3 challenges I faced that led to some important insights that can equip you for online fundraising growth.

Ready? Here goes…

1. Your Context Is More Important Than the Average

The first step in creating this study of key online fundraising metrics was to find the average monthly web traffic, donations, and average gift size. This is a little bit easier said than done.

But after cleaning the data, scrubbing organizations whose data was verifiably inaccurate, and crunching the numbers – here’s what we found:

The average (median) nonprofit had 12,708 website sessions per month.

The average (median) nonprofit saw .61% of those website sessions convert into donations.

The average (median) nonprofit had a $106.71 average gift size.

What bearing does the average have on your organization’s performance?

That’s the question I asked right away. With so many different shapes and sizes of nonprofit organizations, how does the average performance of 155 organizations really help?

If you have a lot of web traffic (say in the millions per month), you might think these online fundraising metrics aren’t even relevant. Same goes if you have really low traffic.

You may walk away thinking “This benchmark is for someone else.”

But that’s why you need to dig a little deeper and view these metrics in a context relevant to your own. And when we drilled in, we saw a fuller picture that’s a lot more helpful…

The more traffic an organization has, the lower their conversion rate and average gift sizes tend to be.

In order to get an accurate picture of what conversion rates and average gift sizes are possible for your organization, you have to compare yourself to organizations with similar traffic volume.

2. Just Because You Have Data Doesn’t Mean It’s Reliable

In another area of the report, we dove into specific web traffic channels to see which ones are most effective for driving revenue. But the initial result didn’t make a whole lot of sense.

The number one channel for driving online revenue appeared to be direct traffic.

When we start working with a new nonprofit partner, one of the first recommendations we make is almost always some form of improving Google Analytics tracking. It’s shocking how many nonprofits (and for-profits) aren’t accurately tracking their marketing and fundraising efforts properly.

And when we look at organizations in the benchmark report that we can verify are tracking revenue and web traffic properly, the picture changes.

Email is the Most Effective Revenue Generator

In almost every scenario where we can verify that revenue and campaigns are being tracked properly, email is actually the biggest driver of online revenue and donations. Here’s a quick look at 3 organizations that are tracking their revenue properly.

A Health Organization

This health related organization brings in 199% more revenue through email than they do from direct traffic.

A Public Policy Organization

This public policy organization brings in 421% more revenue through email than they do from direct traffic.

A Higher Education Organization

This higher education organization brings in 739% more revenue through email than they do from direct traffic.

At the end of the day, email is the most effective channel you have at your disposal to drive online fundraising revenue. If you’re not actively growing your email file, you might want to re-think where you’re focusing your online fundraising efforts.

3. Not All Fundraising Channels Have the Same Potential

If we were to simply look at channels that drive revenue directly and stop there, we’d likely do ourselves more harm than good. Because, as you know, there’s a whole lot more to fundraising than simply asking for a donation.

That being said, based on what we’ve seen in other research studies (like this on one mid-level donors), it seems that many online fundraising programs place a major emphasis on the role of cultivation in online channels.

I would guess that we often forget or ignore online cultivation strategies because there isn’t a lot of data out there on what really works.

To help see what channels may be most effective for cultivation, we scored the engagement value of each primary web traffic channel. And we found that Referral Traffic and Social Media Traffic have the highest engagement.

Using High Engagement Channels as a Donation Primer

First off, let’s define what a donation primer is.

A donation primer is a piece of content that gets a prospective donor ready for a fundraising appeal.

A donation primer doesn’t make a direct donation ask in and of itself. It simply helps someone gain a deeper understanding of why a donation is valuable.

Here’s a quick experiment to show you how it works…

Version A – Visitors did not see donation priming articles

In version A of this experiment, the traffic segment being analyzed saw the normal news articles and blog content on this organization’s website.

Version B – Visitors did see donation priming articles

In version B of this experiment, the traffic segment being analyzed saw the normal news articles and blog content, but they also looked at an article that was designed to help them understand the value of donating to this organization.

The Results

This experiment was conducted around year-end season. After the season was over, they analyzed the behaviors of these 2 traffic segments. The traffic segment that saw the donation priming articles was 196% more likely to donate.

Although blogs and articles (that might get shared on social media, linked to from referral sites, and rank in organic search results) aren’t good drivers of direct revenue, they can certainly make a major impact on the likelihood that someone gives later on.

Turning your high engagement channels into a donation primer is one strategy you can use to start seeing direct revenue impact from your “non-revenue-driving” channels.

3 Essential Online Fundraising Metrics

There’s a whole lot more data, insights, metrics, and quick tips in the full report on 3 Essential Metrics for Online Fundraising Success. And the whole report is designed specifically to help you figure out where to start testing and optimizing.

You can get a free copy of the report to see how your organization stacks up against others, and learn how you can grow your online fundraising revenue.

About the author:

Nathan is the Marketing Director for NextAfter. He spends every day working to help nonprofit organizations discover how testing and optimization can transform their marketing and fundraising, leading to greater impact and organizational growth. He is also a giant Star Wars nerd.

3 Online Fundraising Metrics that Every Nonprofit Needs to Track

After a workshop, conference, webinar, or other online fundraising training event, the most common question that people ask is, “Where do I start growing my online fundraising?” But the answer is rarely as simple as “Start with your donation page” or “Start with your email copy.” The answer always comes back to 3 key online fundraising metrics.

There are 3 online fundraising metrics that are essential to helping nonprofits grow their online revenue. And knowing where you stand with each of these 3 metrics is how you answer the question of “Where do I start growing my online fundraising?”

Over the course of this post, we’re going to look at each of the 3 online fundraising metrics and look at a few key strategies to growing each one.

But first, it’s important to understand why these 3 metrics are so important.

3 Online Fundraising Metrics that Directly Impact Revenue

If we’re being honest, the only online fundraising metric that really matters is revenue.

But just saying “I want to improve my revenue” doesn’t really give you a starting place for how to improve your revenue.

So we have to dig a little deeper.

The natural next question is “What metrics influence revenue?” And when it comes to online fundraising, there are 3 metrics that have a direct impact on your bottom line:

Website Traffic

Donation Conversion Rate

Average Gift Size

Let’s think on it for a moment…

Increasing Revenue Directly

If you get more people to show up to your website, and the same percentage donate to you and they’re giving the same amount – your revenue goes up!

In the same way, if you don’t change the amount of people coming to your website, but you get a higher percentage of people to donate at the same average amount – your revenue goes up!

And if you all you do is get the same donors to give a little bit more – your revenue goes up!

Increasing Revenue Exponentially

Now imagine you got more people to show up to your website, and a higher percentage of them started giving. Your revenue is going to grow like crazy.

And if you were able to get more people, to donate more often, and donate in larger amounts…you won’t even know what to do with all the new revenue you have. Imagine the impact it could have for your cause.

These 3 online fundraising metrics – web traffic, conversion rate, and average gift – should be the driving force behind all of your online fundraising decisions. If your new campaign idea isn’t going to affect one of these fundraising metrics in the long run, is it really worth it?

Online Fundraising Metric #1 – Website Traffic

Let’s take a closer look at website traffic. This is one of the hardest online fundraising metrics for a nonprofit to improve – especially if your traffic is really low to begin with.

Why is it so hard? Because it often takes money and a healthy budget to boost traffic.

But I’m going to share a couple options that don’t require you to enter a credit card in order to boost your traffic. If you want to spend money, there’s a million ad platforms willing to help you out – although I’d recommend that you start with Facebook if you’re looking to acquire donors.

Grow your Website Traffic Using the Google Ad Grant

The first free way to boost your website traffic is through the Google Ad Grant. In short, Google gives nonprofits $10k worth of free search advertising to spend per month. The problem is that most nonprofits either:

Grow your Website Traffic by Creating Good Content

You’re probably familiar with the term SEO (search engine optimization). Essentially, this is the practice of improving the content on your website so that it shows up when people search for related topics.

For instance, if you search for Nonprofit Fundraising Optimization, we should be right there at the top. Want to know the secret formula we’ve used to rank at the top for that keyword?

We create good content related to nonprofit fundraising optimization. Plain and simple.

Now, there are a lot of other factors that come into play when Google decides what websites show up in their search results:

Are you targeting a specific keyword?

Does that keyword show up in your headline?

Are people who visit your page spending time there?

But at the core, if you create good content that’s relevant to your cause, you’re going to show up when people search for topics related to your cause.

General donation pages have a wide variety of traffic and motivations.

The messaging that you use on these pages needs to relate to your organizations broader goals and vision. It shouldn’t focus on a specific aspect of your cause or a specific campaign. If it’s too specific, you risk alienating a lot of your potential donors. Get a general donation page template »

Campaign donation pages have a more specific motivation.

The people visiting these pages have been driven either by an advertisement or an email with a specific prompt. The messaging on your campaign donation page needs to align with the call-to-action that your potential donor just clicked on. Get a campaign donation page template »

A visitor to this page has just submitted a form – they’ve signed up for your newsletter, requested an eBook, registered for a course, etc. Your instant donation page needs to thank them, and then pivot into a donation ask related to the offer they just received. Get an instant donation page template »

Online Fundraising Metric #3 – Average Gift Size

The last key online fundraising metric that’s essential for nonprofits to track and optimize is average gift size.

If you don’t fully know what this is, let’s define it quickly…

Average gift size (for online fundraising) is your total online revenue divided by your total number of donations.

For instance, if you received $10,000 in donations this month, and you had 100 total donations, your average gift size would be $100.

This key online fundraising metrics is arguably the hardest of the 3 to control. You can’t just spend more money on ads like you can with web traffic. And swapping the color of a donate button doesn’t necessarily make people more generous.

The common factor in increasing average gift size is your value proposition.

Now, you could make a solid argument that more complex online fundraising metrics like donor retention play a big factor in average gift size. And they likely do. But the way shape and craft your value proposition is the easiest factor to control.

How to Increase Average Gift Size by Crafting a Better Value Proposition

Your value proposition is, essentially, the way you answer this question: “Why should I give to you, rather than some other organization, or not at all?”

And the way you answer this question in your emails, in your advertising, and on your donation page directly affects the likelihood that someone will donate. But your value proposition also can affect how much they donate.

One organization we work with has a very unique service they offer…they provide websites for people going through health crises so that their loved ones can keep up with them on their health journey.

This unique service makes it hard to ask for donations in a traditional sense. They don’t raise money to cover medical costs – they raise money to provide their service to more people for free.

Here’s what one of their on-site donation ads looked like:

It says, “Honor Kade and Kallan with a donation to [Organization]. You make Kade and Kallan’s website possible.”

We created a treatment to try and help potential donors better understand the impact of a donation. The treatment version looked like this:

It says, “Show your love and support for Kade. Make a donation to [Organization] to keep Kade’s site up and running.”

The treatment version increased donations by 44%. But it also increased average gift size by 16.2%.

Not only did improving the value proposition lead to more donations, it led to larger donations.

Determining Which Metric to Optimize First

Now that you’ve seen the power of all 3 of these online fundraising metrics to increase revenue, you need to figure out where you stand.

Is your web traffic low? Or are you just not converting enough of your website visitors into donors? Or…maybe you have a lot of people donating, but they’re giving very little.

In order to know where to optimize first, you need to compare your 3 online fundraising metrics to other similar nonprofits to see how you measure up. You can compare your 3 key metrics to other organizations with the online fundraising benchmark report here »

About the author:

Nathan is the Marketing Director for NextAfter. He spends every day working to help nonprofit organizations discover how testing and optimization can transform their marketing and fundraising, leading to greater impact and organizational growth. He is also a giant Star Wars nerd.

7 Guidelines for Using Nonprofit Data to Tell a Story

That quote from Darrell Huff’s How to Lie With Statistics seems to be extremely relevant in the nonprofit sector. Now, I’m not going to call out any specific names or organizations, but I’ve seen this play out countless times.

I’ve sat through many meetings, webinars, and conference sessions where the data being shared either a) doesn’t mean what the speaker thinks it means, b) has been cherry picked in order to make a point, or c) is just outright irrelevant to the point being made.

This is Kevin.

Super duper honesty time…I’ve been guilty of this, and you probably have too – even if you didn’t realize it.

Insert Kevin Peters, our CTO. One of my first tasks at NextAfter was to run a web audit for a client we had just started working with. And Kevin showed me the ropes of how to use nonprofit data to tell a compelling story, while also being fair to what the data says.

And at the last NIO Summit, Kevin shared his 7 guidelines for telling a story with nonprofit data. These guidelines will not only help you create better presentations to report your fundraising success, but also help you communicate your impact to your donors even better.

If you’d like, you can watch Kevin’s whole talk below. And if you’d like to catch all the NIO Summit action, you can learn more about the conference at https://www.niosummit.com

Let’s get into the 7 guidelines for telling a story with nonprofit data without manipulating it.

Keep Your Data in Context

It’s very tempting to cherry pick the data that best supports your case and ignore the rest of what the data is saying. But data is more compelling when it tells the complete story.

There are lots of way this can play out. Looking at demographic data without looking at population density can drastically change your view of the data. Adjusting the scale of a chart can make it look like there’s an even more drastic change than there really is.

There’s a great example of this in an article on #GivingTuesday from a fairly popular nonprofit blog. They were making the case for how important #GivingTuesday is.

The 3 graphs show 3 different major giving days – #GivingTuesday, December 31, and the typical response to a disaster (like a hurricane) – and how giving on those days compares to the surrounding 5 days.

When you take these graphs at face value, they clearly show #GivingTuesday is far superior to any of these other major giving days. And the implication is that you should prioritize #GivingTuesday over December 31st.

When we took a look at 17 of our nonprofit clients, we saw a total of $1.5 Million in donations on #GivingTuesday in 2017. That’s 3% of total year-end giving for this same group.

On the other hand, December 31st brought in $7 Million in donations – 14% of total year-end giving.

That makes December 31st more than 5 times as valuable as #GivingTuesday in terms of immediate revenue. Not only that, but the average gift size is much, much higher on December 31st as well.

The context is everything here. A good year-end fundraising campaign doesn’t just happen in one day. We’re sending messages leading up to year-end as part of a larger campaign. We’re talking to our donors. We’re leading into the next year, the big vision, and what we’re trying to accomplish.

So while #GivingTuesday can be super important – 3% of year-end revenue is nothing to sneeze at – the data would say that you shouldn’t prioritize #GivingTuesday over December 31st.

The most impactful story data can tell is the whole story.

Keep Your Data Honest

Honest data, even if it’s at your expense, is always superior to manipulated data.

In his talk, Kevin shared that he received an email from a nonprofit he believed deeply in. He’s a donor and was thrilled to hear that they had rescued 10,000 children with his help!

But at the bottom of the email, the footer said that the organization had rescued 9,977 children. They had rounded up to get the 10,000.

You may have the best intentions when rounding or approximating your data, but it can be perceived as dishonesty. And there are few things more harmful to your fundraising than degrading the trust of your donors.

When you’re not totally honest with your nonprofit data, it produces a disconnect in the mind of your donors, and it kills your credibility. And credibility is one of the essential elements of a value proposition. Keep your data honest.

Keep Your Data Humble

Most nonprofits are not overtly trying to deceive their donors. But it’s human nature to overstate the problem you’re trying to solve in order to get people to support our cause.

Overstating the problem you’re trying to solve can erode trust. For example, take a look at this infographic…

One out of four people will need a blood transfusion in their lives — yet less than 10 percent are giving blood. You see that and say, “Wow! I need to go give blood.”

The implication is that not enough people are giving blood to support the need – 1 in 10 people giving blood doesn’t support the 1 in 4 that need it.

BUT… these two data points are not referring to the same time periods. 1 in 4 people need a transfusion in their lifetime versus 1 in 10 people giving blood annually.

Let’s do a little data math…

Let’s say we’ve got a population with 1000 people. This data says 250 of these people will need a transfusion in their lifetime. And if all of these people needed a full blood transfusion, they would require (at the max) 12 units of blood each.

250 people X 12 units of blood = 3,000 units of blood needed

Now let’s assume the average lifespan is 65 years. And let’s also assume that people aren’t giving blood annually until they’re a legal adult at 18 years old. That means there are 100 people giving blood annually for a period of 47 years.

100 people giving 1 unit of blood X 47 years = 4,700 units of blood available

If you’ve followed all that math, it really looks like we have a blood surplus.

So for data nerds like Kevin (and me depending on the day), this infographic actually says “Hey, we’re good to go on blood.” Now, if you’re more informed on this issue than I am, you’re probably shaking your fist saying “You don’t understand! There is a shortage of blood!” But that’s exactly the point. I don’t understand the problem accurately based on the data presented.

Conflicting data doesn’t help you make your case – it erodes trust and makes people question your authenticity.

Kevin actually makes the case in his talk that we need more vampires. I’m not exactly pro-vampire, so I’ll spare you the pitch.

Keep Your Data Relevant

To tell a compelling story with nonprofit data, the information has to truly matter. It’s important to measure and report on data that makes a real change in the fight for your cause.

When you use data that doesn’t matter, your donors will start ignoring the data you present, because it doesn’t mean anything.

What does this actually look like? Below is an annual report from an organization. And similar to a lot of organizations, they talk about their social media reach.

In this case, they say they have a reach of 350,000 fans and followers. That’s pretty big number! But there’s a problem…

If you have 350,000 fans, that doesn’t mean you have 350,000 people.

Most of your fans have multiple social media accounts, which creates duplicates in your numbers. For instance, if a fan follows you on Facebook, more than likely, they also follow you on Instagram. That same person might follow you on Twitter as well, which means one person is following you on three different social media platforms.

Your total number of followers from all of your platforms could easily be three times the actual number of people following, because each person has more than one social media account.

The total number of fans doesn’t even tell us your true social media reach because social media platforms limit your organic reach.

You might have 100,000 Facebook fans, but according to the data below, you’re only going to reach 0.5% of them with any of your posts.

Over the years, Facebook has been steadily decreasing the amount of impressions a nonprofit can get as far as organic reach goes. If you want to reach all your followers, you have to pay.

So yes, you might have 350,000 followers and fans… but in all actuality you have 1,750 people that are actually engaged. That’s the actual impact that you’re having on social media.

But my goal here isn’t to rip on Facebook. That might be another blog. The point is this…

Use data that matters. Share numbers that communicate impact, even if they’re smaller. Impacting 1,750 people directly is much more compelling than have 350k followers that never see your posts.

Keep You Data Correct

Sometimes the story we’re telling with data isn’t compelling because we’re using the wrong metric. This example causes more damage when you’re reporting to a boss or a coworker, but it illustrates the issue well.

People like to champion their total number of email subscribers. It’s an important metric, but it’s not always the most informative.

So when someone says that have 1 Million email subscribers, we start digging in just a little bit.

If we have a million people, why are we getting a thousand dollars?

Yes, you have a million subscribers, but what are they doing? Uh oh… 57% have never clicked or opened a single email we’ve ever sent them. 60% haven’t opened in the last six months.

You have 1 million email addresses, but you actually have 270,000 subscribers. The people who actually open your email are your real subscribers.

Why is this a problem?

Because when you say you have a million subscribers and then you get a thousand dollars return on an appeal, it starts raising questions.

It’s important to recognize this so you can correct it and then get some actual stats that you can use to project out to the future.

Use the correct metrics to make your decisions, not vanity metrics.

Keep Your Data Personal

Keeping data relevant, honest, correct, and in context is all hard work. Many fundraisers would rather throw their hands in the air and say, “We don’t need data! We just need a good story.”

Let me argue that point…with data.

The majority of your best donors need good data to make your stories compelling. Allow me to explain.

The DISC assessment is a tool that analyzes communication styles and behaviors, and it categorizes people into four main personality types:

Dominance

Influence

Steadiness

Conscientiousness

Conscientiousness people (high Cs) are driven by being right and accurate. They want science or data to back up the claims they believe in. A study of 2 million Americans showed that around 14% of the population tends to have a High C personality.

What Is the Dominant Personality of Your Donors?

We conducted an experiment with four different organizations in 2017. We stumbled upon a technology called “Crystal Knows” which uses machine-learning algorithms to assess somebody’s personality. Let me tell you, this technology is creepily accurate.

We took all the donors from four different nonprofits and appended their DISC score to their donor profiles. The experiment sampled about 1.8 million people. Here’s what we found…

43% of donors have a High C personality.

In other words, 43% of your donor base is hard-wired to respond to appeals that are backed by good data!

Use data to tell your stories in a way that appeals to the different types of personalities in your donor base. When you understand how your donors think, you’ll begin to see that data is a very personal matter that speaks to them in their language.

Impact is always better than big numbers.

When you’re looking at statistics — when you’re looking at facts — don’t just look for facts that support your position. If the sum of all the facts doesn’t lead to your position, perhaps it’s time to readjust what you believe.

Present your nonprofit data clearly and simply. The more confusing it is, the less likely people will be to believe it.

Don’t be afraid of the truth that your data is telling you. The truth always tells a more compelling story than misleading exaggerations. And relying on your cherry-picked version of the truth is never going to lead to positive outcomes.

You don’t have to be a nonprofit data scientist to tell a story with data.

I am not a data scientist. I don’t have a degree in statistics, analytics, data science, or any type of math. But treating data accurately and fairly doesn’t require an advanced degree. And having an advanced degree doesn’t automatically mean your analysis isn’t manipulative.

It’s my hope that these guidelines will give you a framework to help you with your next presentation, your next deep dive into your analytics, and even the next email that you write to your donors.

And if you want more expert ideas and strategies for your fundraising, every speaker session from the Nonprofit Innovation & Optimization Summit is available to you watch for free. Each speaker has tips and ideas related to search, analytics, data, copywriting, recurring giving, advertising, and much more.

About the author:

Nathan is the Marketing Director for NextAfter. He spends every day working to help nonprofit organizations discover how testing and optimization can transform their marketing and fundraising, leading to greater impact and organizational growth. He is also a giant Star Wars nerd.

5 Nonprofit Analytics Reports That You Can Create in Google to Track Your Fundraising

Google Analytics is a powerful tool — but just because it’s tracking your nonprofit analytics doesn’t mean you’re getting the most out it. In her talk at the Nonprofit Innovation & Optimization Summit, Annie Cushing of annielytics.com revealed 5 Google Analytics reports that are essential for nonprofits to optimize their online fundraising.

I’m going to break these 5 reports down for you here. But if you’d like, you can watch her full talk on “How to Mine for Gold in Google Analytics” below. And if you’d like to join the next NIO Summit to catch more sessions like this in person, you can check out more at https://www.niosummit.com

Optimizing donor conversions is all about making better decisions — and you can only make better decisions when you’ve got the best data available to you in an easy-to-understand format.

Google Analytics will track much of the data you need, but the tricky part is knowing what nonprofit analytics data is valuable, and how to get that data into a format that you can understand and make decisions with.

To get your online fundraising data in a format that’s helpful, you need these 5 google analytics reports.

5 Missing Custom Google Analytics Reports

Unfortunately, Google seems to think that all you need are the reports they provide out of the box.

But as smart and perfect as we like to think the folks at Google are, you have to tweak their reporting to get to the nonprofit analytics data that you really need to optimize your fundraising.

To do that, you’ll need to get familiar with Google Analytics’ Custom Reports.

Paid Social Report

By default, all of your paid social media advertising is going to go into the “other” channel, assuming you’re using standard utm tracking. But tracking your paid social media marketing separately is important because… well, you’re paying for it!

To track the performance of your paid social ads separately, you have to tell Google that you want it broken out. Now, changing your Google Analytics settings may sound daunting to some of you. But this part is really easy.

Annie has a quick youtube video on how to set-up “Paid Social” as a new traffic channel in your reports:

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If you don’t set up this custom traffic channel, Google is going to lump your paid social media into the “Other” channel along with anything else marked as “CPV” or “Cost-Per-View.” And in our experience, Facebook Ads perform very differently than traffic sources that typically get lumped into the “Other” bucket.

If you need help making sure all your online fundraising campaigns are tracked properly, check out the free UTM Maker tool. You type in a few details about your campaign, and it will generate a perfectly tracked URL for you.

*We tend to tag our Facebook Advertising with the UTM Medium of “newsfeed”, since the Facebook Newsfeed is the primary location we place our ads. So in your custom traffic channel, you would just set the Paid Social UTM Medium to “newsfeed.”

Retargeting Report

Another channel that’s missing in Google Analytics, but helpful in monitoring your nonprofit analytics, is a retargeting report. This is a little bizarre since Google offers retargeting as an important marketing feature for their product.

Instead of providing a retargeting report, Google recommends tracking display traffic. Display ads are the little ads on the side of sites like huffingtonpost.com pointing to other sites.

Unlike most display traffic, retargeting ads can be as specific as you want.

For example, you can set up retargeting ads to appear later for users who come to your site, look at the donation page, and then they leave.

Retargeting is like if you hired someone to identify anyone leaving your store without a bag and chase them down. But in a nice, unobtrusive way.

“Excuse me! Did you not find what you were looking for?” That’s retargeting.

Annie highly recommends creating a custom channel for retargeting.

To do that, set up another medium in your Google Analytics report to “retargeting.” You’ll just have to remember to use “retargeting” as your UTM Medium when you set up your ads.

Press Release Report

The press release report is for nonprofits that are actively sending out press releases. If this is you, this report will help you track the activity generated by your press releases with ease.

To set up your press release report, create a new custom report and select “Source” as your first rule. Then, set your rule to match “regex” as you see below.

Match the source to field to the various source sites that you’re sending press releases out through. That way, you’ll be able to track all website traffic coming from one of the releases your sent out.

Some organizations may have a separate sites where they publish blogs, news, articles, or other types of media. A partner report will help you see who is coming to your site from the other sites you oversee.

To set up your custom partner report, you’ll need to set up the source as “regex” and then enter the various partner sites that could be sending you traffic.

You can also use this report to measure the traffic you get from bigger publishers that you allow to republish your posts. Having bigger publishing sites republish your content gives you wider exposure and you’ll want to track this traffic in a custom channel.

Guest Blogging Report

The last report you need to set up in Google Analytics to get your nonprofit analytics in order is the guest blogging report.

Many organizations (and companies) will have blog posts, articles, and other media types that are posted other organization’s websites.

If you’re doing any kind of guest blogging or publishing like this, you can set up this guest blogging report to easily track and monitor what traffic you’re getting back from those guest posts.

For example, if you are nonprofit serving environmental causes, you might write guest posts for websites such as Huffpost Green. Your posts on their online magazine can bring your site an incredible stream of traffic that you’d never reach on your own platform.

To track your guest post traffic, set your source to “regex” and then enter the various sites where you post guest content.

Getting Your Nonprofit Analytics Tracking Right

Tracking nonprofit analytics such as traffic data is an extremely important part of making informed decisions to optimize your online fundraising. We often find that different traffic sources have different motivations. And if you can’t differentiate between your different sources, you could be missing opportunity.

If this post was too “in the weeds” for you, but you want help getting your tracking set up properly, just contact us and let us know. We’ll see if we can help, or at least point you to some additional resources that can help.

And if you want more expert ideas and strategies for your fundraising, every speaker session from the Nonprofit Innovation & Optimization Summit is available to you watch for free. Each speaker has tips and ideas related to search, analytics, data, copywriting, recurring giving, advertising, and much more.

About the author:

Nathan is the Marketing Director for NextAfter. He spends every day working to help nonprofit organizations discover how testing and optimization can transform their marketing and fundraising, leading to greater impact and organizational growth. He is also a giant Star Wars nerd.